Sub-zero weather
12 below and a killer wind slice through me.
Bundled in jeans, sweatshirt, parka, scarf, gloves
And a leather fur air force cap that buckles under my chin
I pad through the back lot
Toward the din of the diggers, backhoes and jackhammers
Ripping up the sidewalk.
The flag-girl smiles, weaves me between the dump trucks
To the other side of the street.

The things we do for our vices.

I emerge in the outdoor patio area
Of the small strip mall
Sit down at a small table with my peeps,
Pull out a white stick and a blue butane,
Flick it into flame and the white stick
Glows with a red ember end.

We talk a bit of small talk,
Laugh a lot, smoke our sticks
And drink our brown liquid
Hoping it will warm us up. It doesn’t.
We are shivering. We are cold.
The world is cold.

I head back to the street noise,
Diggers, backhoes, jackhammers,
Flag-girl and torn sidewalk.
Sub-zero weather,
12 below and a killer wind slicing through me,
I wonder,
When did the world turn
So bloody, bloody cold.

—

The Illusion

Off on a tangent again,
Tripping through geometric illusions
And circles of another brand,
Without my trusty slide rule.
I’m slipping and sliding
Down a tilt-a-whirl arc
In a carnival of haphazard numbers.

There is sense buried somewhere
In this land of triangular treasure chests
Encase in invisible chains.

H2O above.
H2O below;
Rain on the ocean.
Mist on the sea;
And Houdini’s keys
Laying beside a rusty protractor
Caught in a bottomless
Bed of kelp.

Off on a tangent again,
Encased in invisible chains,
I become the illusion.

—

The Sands Of Eternity

Caught in the obtuse angle
Of a one-sided thought,
My mind circles
In square root patterns
On a canvas of shifting sands.

Sparkles sewn
Into the pale gray carpet I lay on
Form diagonal paths
Across the ink-stained pages
Of my consciousness.

In the distance,
Growing louder as it approaches,
A disembodied flute plays
In a harmony of circular echoes
Held in invisible dance
Nuzzling the rain
Blowing kisses onto the wind.

I walk through sun shadows,
Mind strum rainbow songs,
Sparkle for a brief moment,
Then melt into the sands of eternity.

—

The Understanding

We are knee-deep
In our own patterns of eternity
Weaving the destiny we wear
Mapping the world we create
Stumbling through dreams,
Tripping on nightmares,
Cutting our teeth on the knife of life.

Visible and invisible,
Peeling hours like oranges,
Sharing slices of time,
We are ghosts
Filtering in and out of sky and soil.

Dreaming we’re lying awake.
Awake we’re inside the dream.

We are vapid expectations
Of our own personal poetry
Filling page upon page
With fog and sunlight,
Moons and stardust.

Waist deep,
We begin the understanding.

This entry was posted
on Thursday, July 31st, 2014 at 12:11 pm and is filed under Spotlight.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Search for:

The Online Hollywood
Insider Magazine

Why You Should
Advertise with TAEM

Besides the many college students who have access to our Publication we have had 98,408 Visits and 161,679 Page Views.

We create exposure for you by creating exposure for the Magazine:

Students & Faculty Population: 8,816

Students Population: 1,400

Students and Staff: 35,522

Students and Staff: 26,587

Student population: 26,144

University of Glasgow, Scotland
29,000 Students and Staff

For September and October- We will be advertising in Virginia Tech with a Student and Staff population of 34,485

In October we will be advertising in the University of Southern California with a Student and Staff population of 55,000.

Ohio State University has nearly 65,000 Students (among the three biggest in the country). Their paper and website, where our ad appears in September and October, averages more than 100K unique visitors, and nearly 300K pageviews/month during their school year.

Ads have been placed in The University of California Los Angeles ( UCLA) with a Student population of 37,000.

Over 58,000 students (second largest in the nation)
over 175,000 page views in 30 days

The Eerie Digest Magazine is now offering a new program to college students from Coast to Coast, to have the world read their work, and display the young talent this country has to offer.

We are looking forward to see some of the fine work that these Universities, and their students, can produce. For more information on this program have your college, or University, contact us through this site. Contact information is available on the top left hand corner of the Homepage.

All Short Stories and Novels by Joseph J. O'Donnell are copyrighted and cannot be used without permission.

The Eerie Digest does not stand behind any advertisements placed in this magazine nor do we back any guarantees, waranties, products, or services placed in this magazine by advertisers.

The Eerie Digest does not stand behind any advertising or promotions made by sponsors for their products or services. These advertisements and promotions are by, and for, the sponsor's sole benefit alone. This also goes for any advertisements or promotions represented within interviews, or other aspects in the magazine that are offered for the readers interest. Anyone responding to ads or promotions should verify their content's genuine offer before doing so.

All characters, places, and events in these stories are fictitious, and any resembelence
to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.